Help! I Seem to be Getting More Autistic!"
What's this about?
Those of us who experience this are often surprised, because of the general perceptions that are out there about autism. It is viewed either as something stable, or, as in the writings of Liane Holliday Willey, Temple Grandin, and other authors, as something that fades away with age.
The fact that some autistic people lose abilities with age is well-documented, but it is not always discussed in clear ways. It is clouded by terms like regression (which implies that loss of skills is growing backwards), functioning level (which implies that all functioning is affected at the same level and that this can be measured in a linear fashion), and more autistic (which implies similar things to functioning level). When autistic people ask organizations about it, we often get confusing answers — for example, when I asked one representative of a major autism organization about being an autistic person who lost some movement skills in adolescence, she said, "Yes, there is such a thing as late-onset autism," as if I had not been autistic before this happened.
This has been writing itself in my head for a long time. It started writing itself on paper about a year ago or more. I wish I'd had a list of things like this a few years ago, and it's based on what I'd like to have known. I hope it will be useful to other autistic people. It is intended to give people a list of starting points to understand what is happening to them. It is, though a starting point — more heavily focused on what is going on than what to do about it. This is because there are still more questions than answers, and because answers vary from person to person. I am providing answers that come with more questions. It is also intended to be practical first, medically perfect second — some of the research or opinions linked to from here may be largely wrong, but may be a starting point to looking at other things.
I hope it will be useful to other autistic people, who are the primary audience. Personal information is only disclosed because I hope someone in a similar situation would find it useful. This page could also be useful for non-autistic people who have an autistic person in their lives who is acting more stereotypically autistic than they had been, but they are not the people I'm directly aiming this at. It is not, and probably cannot be, exhaustive, and there will be things I cannot cover in here. However, I do try to cover everything I can think of, including things that are relatively uncommon. If something doesn't seem to fit, or seems obvious, feel free to ignore it. I will try to improve and add to this as time goes on.
I would like to cite my sources for this information, but unfortunately I don't remember most of the sources. I have included a list of further references at the bottom, but a lot of this is consolidated from years of information-gathering in which I did not frequently take note of where I found the information. New sections of this document contain the date they were added.
Note: If you are fairly new to knowing you are autistic or thinking about being autistic, you might want to read the section about learning that you are autistic before anything else. What could be going on?
Note that in some of the cases below, neither the situation nor the result is necessarily negative.
Aging
When non-autistic people age, they often lose some of their former cognitive abilities in a subtle way. When autistic people age, what would be subtle in a non-autistic person can cause extreme-looking differences in an autistic person, because our hold on certain kinds of cognition is so shaky in the first place.
There has been very little study done on what happens to autistic people as they get older, but personal reports suggest that many common ways of dealing with the world as an autistic person can become less feasible with time. Thus, a person who has been working very hard to keep up with the non-autistic world may suddenly find herself slowing down and needing to do less of it. This can look like becoming more autistic, even when it's simply being less able to adjust.
Basic physical needs
This may sound obvious, but to a lot of us, it isn't. If a person lacks food, water, sleep, and in some cases hygiene, they are not going to function as well. Autistic or non-autistic. If you are malnourished (which can happen even if you eat the right amount of food, if you're not eating the right kinds of food or if your metabolism is fast), dehydrated (which some fluids you drink can contribute to rather than solve), or sleep-deprived (which can happen even if you sleep a lot, if you have something like sleep apnea interfering with sleep), you are not going to function as well. It is a good idea to look into these basics before anything else — wherever possible, if you improve food, water, and sleep, you might see improvement.
Being around other autistic people
For those of us who are echolalic or echopraxic, being around other autistic people can cause us to pick up mannerisms, phrasings, and sounds from others. When I lived around mostly non-autistic people, while I had autistic patterns of doing things, I was more likely to pick up non-autistic mannerisms to add to them. When I was in special ed, I picked up (without always realizing it at the time) mannerisms not only from other autistic people, but from at least one student with cerebral palsy.
There is something about other autistic people, though, that makes their mannerisms easier and more natural-feeling for me to echo than anyone else's — even when they are things I had not done before, they feel more right on my body. Some other autistic people have reported that being around other autistic people has a similar influence on them, and this has also been reported by Touretters.
Note: Some people see this kind of thing and say that it is exactly why autistic people should be kept away from other autistic people. I do not believe this. I do not believe that it is worse to have autistic mannerisms than non-autistic mannerisms, and I do not believe that autistic people make bad role models. I definitely don't believe that any of this is a reason to separate autistic people from each other or to encourage an autistic person to dislike being around other autistic people.
Brain damage
Non-autistic people with brain damage often develop traits that bear some resemblance to autism. Since autism is developmental, our brains have already developed the way they are, damaged or not, so there are some differences. But if an autistic person develops significant enough brain damage, it could show up as looking more autistic.
Many autistic people self-injure by banging our heads. This can cause brain damage, especially if we do it frequently, very hard, or to the point of knocking ourselves out or causing minor concussions. Having a head injury for some other reason, stroke, or brain tumor can cause brain damage. So can the drugs and shock treatments (ECT) that some autistic people are given.
The Traumatic Brain Injury Survival Guide gives some information about how brain damage can change a person. Many of the same traits can be autistic traits, so having them does not necessarily indicate recent brain damage.
Burnout
Burnout, long-term shutdown, or whatever you want to call it, happens generally when you have been doing much more than you should be doing. Most people have a level to which they are capable of functioning without burnout, a level to which they are capable of functioning for emergency purposes only, and a level to which they simply cannot function. In autistic people in current societies, that first level is much narrower. Simply functioning at a minimally acceptable level to non-autistic people or for survival, can push us into the zone that in a non-autistic person would be reserved for emergencies. Prolonged functioning in emergency mode can result in loss of skills and burnout.
The danger here may be obvious: It may be the people most capable of passing for normal, the most obvious "success stories" in the eyes of non-autistic people (some of whom became so adept at passing that they were never considered autistic in the first place), who are the most likely to burn out the hardest and suddenly need to either act in very conspicuously autistic ways or die.
To the outside world, this can look as if a forty-year-old perfectly normal person suddenly starts acting like a very stereotypically autistic person, and they can believe that this is a sudden change rather than a cumulative burnout eventually resulting in a complete inability to function in any way that looks remotely normal. The outside world is not used to things like this, and the autistic person might not be either. They might look for the sudden onset of a neurological disorder, or for psychological causes, and receive inappropriate "treatments" for both of these, when really all that has happened is massive and total burnout.
This can also look much less spectacular, or be much more gradual, and it can happen in any autistic person. Sometimes, with more supports or a change in pace or environment, the skills lost come back partially or totally. Sometimes the loss in skills appears to be permanent — but even that can be somewhat deceptive, because sometimes it is simply that the person can no longer push themselves far beyond what their original capacity was in the first place.
Sometimes this kind of burnout is what leads adults to seek diagnosis and services. Unfortunately, many service systems that would otherwise support people in their own homes, cater only to people who were diagnosed in childhood, and will look at someone with a very good neurotypical-looking track record of jobs, marriages, and children with suspicion. They need to be made more aware of this possibility, because there's a high chance that an adult in this situation could end up jobless, homeless, institutionalized, misdiagnosed, given inappropriate medical treatment, or dead.
People training autistic children to look more normal or refusing to tell their children they are autistic also need to be aware of this possibility, because this is the potential end result ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years down the road. This is one of the biggest reasons for teaching us to learn and grow as ourselves, accounting for our strengths and weaknesses rather than as counterfeit neurotypicals.
Catatonia
While this is more of a sign than a cause, it is worth mentioning here. There seems to be a subgroup of autistic people who develop an increase in manifestations of catatonia during adolescence or early adulthood. This can happen to different degrees, and it can come and go. The cause is unknown at this time, and most researchers have focused on movement, although some autistic people have found that sensory issues are affected as well.
Catatonia is a much broader term than the stereotype of sitting in one place in an odd posture doing nothing, and it is not synonymous with hallucinations or something. It is a word used to describe any of a number of unusual movement patterns, including but not limited to freezing in a position from anywhere from seconds to days (and either being immovable or bendable into any position a person wants to bend you into), echolalia (imitating others' speech), echopraxia (imitating others' movements). Many of these traits are already present in autism to begin with, so it is thought that in some people, these traits may amplify over time for some reason.
Lorna Wing and Amitta Shah have written a paper on the subject of exacerbation of catatonia: Catatonia in Autistic Spectrum Disorders. While they have written about people in which this is extreme, they note that there are other people who have similar movement issues but who did not have enough of them to qualify for the study.
Note: It should be noted that catatonia can be easily exacerbated by neuroleptic drugs, which interfere with the process of directly connecting thought to movement, and that lethality of such drugs among people with catatonia is much higher than in the general population. If you develop signs of catatonia while on a neuroleptic drug (prescribed as "antipsychotic" and sometimes antiemetic), seek medical care immediately, because this can sometimes be a sign of a potentially-fatal reaction.
Change in Environment or Routine
Here are some of the more major examples of this category:
•Getting married or divorced.
•Getting fired, getting a job, or changing jobs.
•Promotion or demotion at work.
•Changing schools, dropping out of school, going up or down a grade in school, or entering school.
•Moving to a new house or apartment.
•Moving out of or into an institution.
•Death in the family (human or non-human).
•Making a new friend or losing a friend.
Change can be a lot more subtle, though. It can be someone moving your stuff around the room, or hanging a new picture on the wall. It can be changes in weather, climate, or society over time. Since having a regular routine is one way autistic people deal with the environment, when that routine is disrupted, then autistic people often rely on other autistic ways of dealing with things. We can also have less energy to deal with things and thus look more outwardly autistic. Depending on the person and the nature of the changes, this appearance of being "more autistic-looking" can be temporary or long-term.
Compartmentalized learning style, or trouble generalizing
[Added 15 May, 2004]
Some autistic people learn things, but have trouble accessing what we learn out of context. For example, if you (as I did) learn right and left facing a certain wall in a certain room, you might be unable to tell left from right outside of that room. Then, as you learn to generalize it a little bit, you might learn to tell left from right, but only when you are facing east.
If you learn a skill in one environment, you might think you have mastered it. And you might be right — in that environment. But then when you leave that environment, or when a small aspect of that environment changes, you might end up disoriented and unable to do something that you seemed very good at before.
Many autistic people know a lot of things, or know how to do a lot of things, but have a lot of trouble bringing that knowledge out on command. We might rely on triggers in our environments to help us do those things, but in the absence of triggers, our minds might go blank and be unable to come up with the right answer or skill to fill the needs of the moment. We might have one set of skills and knowledge that we can use with ease in one situation, and a completely different set of skills and knowledge that we can use with ease in another situation. In some situations, we may be unable to get at much of this knowledge at all.
This can make for some interesting experiences with apparent loss of knowledge and skills, or even having to relearn the same thing over and over when we forget we've learned it, or need to learn it for a new context. I don't know how many times I've told someone I didn't know something, and then later had the knowledge they wanted triggered in a different context. If this happens to you in drastic enough ways, it can be essentially the same as losing a skill, perhaps forgetting you ever had it, and having to relearn it from scratch if you can relearn it at all.
As an example, I was, as nearly all children were where I was a kid, drilled over and over again in what kinds of strangers to avoid. Like the kind who would lure you into a car with a toy. Yet as a twenty-something adult I was almost lured into a car by a toy. What stopped me was not that I remembered this was dangerous, but that I didn't like the people who were doing it or the fact that they kept touching me and talking about sex. I did not perceive what they might do to me, only that they were unpleasant. I had this skill, somewhere in my brain, but it did not come out at the appropriate moment, and it was days before I put things together enough to relearn this. I still do not know if it is in place enough that this could not happen again.
While what I describe is different from what happens in what gets called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it can definitely be amplified by PTSD. PTSD can involve mentally shoving certain terrible experiences into compartments where they hopefully won't be found easily, and it can increase a tendency to compartmentalize knowledge in general.
Deliberately adopting new strategies
The ways that autistic people behave do not materialize out of nowhere in order to make us look strange. They have purpose to us, and may help us to deal more efficiently with the world than the way a non-autistic person would go about the same task. Often, many autistic people will independently come up with the same way of approaching a situation (some of these ways are so common that they make it into the diagnostic criteria). However, not all autistic people will come up with these things, or some will have come up with them and eradicated them so long ago they don't remember having come up with them.
This leads to the situation in which an autistic person who has trouble dealing with a situation may deliberately choose to approach that situation in the same way as someone she have met who is also autistic. This has the advantage of being more likely to suit an autistic person's brain and senses.
For instance, a commonly-described activity among autistic people is to carry a single object everywhere. Not all autistic people come up with this on their own, but it can be a very effective way of dealing with the increased load of sensory input and processing demands in new places. An autistic adult may see someone doing that and think, "Okay, if they do that and it works, I'm going to try it." They may then look "more autistic" because they are using an strategy that is more efficient for the needs of an autistic brain rather than a non-autistic one.
This can happen with nearly anything labeled an "autistic behavior," because autistic people behave the ways we do for a reason. A person may stop making eye contact because he wants to listen to what is being said. He may start moving his hands in front of his face to regulate visual input. He might start regulating the amount he interacts with people in order to avoid overload and burnout. He may not have thought of doing these things before, but after seeing them work for another autistic person, he may have adopted them and found them more useful than anything a non-autistic person could come up with. This is not a bad thing.
What's this about?
Those of us who experience this are often surprised, because of the general perceptions that are out there about autism. It is viewed either as something stable, or, as in the writings of Liane Holliday Willey, Temple Grandin, and other authors, as something that fades away with age.
The fact that some autistic people lose abilities with age is well-documented, but it is not always discussed in clear ways. It is clouded by terms like regression (which implies that loss of skills is growing backwards), functioning level (which implies that all functioning is affected at the same level and that this can be measured in a linear fashion), and more autistic (which implies similar things to functioning level). When autistic people ask organizations about it, we often get confusing answers — for example, when I asked one representative of a major autism organization about being an autistic person who lost some movement skills in adolescence, she said, "Yes, there is such a thing as late-onset autism," as if I had not been autistic before this happened.
This has been writing itself in my head for a long time. It started writing itself on paper about a year ago or more. I wish I'd had a list of things like this a few years ago, and it's based on what I'd like to have known. I hope it will be useful to other autistic people. It is intended to give people a list of starting points to understand what is happening to them. It is, though a starting point — more heavily focused on what is going on than what to do about it. This is because there are still more questions than answers, and because answers vary from person to person. I am providing answers that come with more questions. It is also intended to be practical first, medically perfect second — some of the research or opinions linked to from here may be largely wrong, but may be a starting point to looking at other things.
I hope it will be useful to other autistic people, who are the primary audience. Personal information is only disclosed because I hope someone in a similar situation would find it useful. This page could also be useful for non-autistic people who have an autistic person in their lives who is acting more stereotypically autistic than they had been, but they are not the people I'm directly aiming this at. It is not, and probably cannot be, exhaustive, and there will be things I cannot cover in here. However, I do try to cover everything I can think of, including things that are relatively uncommon. If something doesn't seem to fit, or seems obvious, feel free to ignore it. I will try to improve and add to this as time goes on.
I would like to cite my sources for this information, but unfortunately I don't remember most of the sources. I have included a list of further references at the bottom, but a lot of this is consolidated from years of information-gathering in which I did not frequently take note of where I found the information. New sections of this document contain the date they were added.
Note: If you are fairly new to knowing you are autistic or thinking about being autistic, you might want to read the section about learning that you are autistic before anything else. What could be going on?
Note that in some of the cases below, neither the situation nor the result is necessarily negative.
Aging
When non-autistic people age, they often lose some of their former cognitive abilities in a subtle way. When autistic people age, what would be subtle in a non-autistic person can cause extreme-looking differences in an autistic person, because our hold on certain kinds of cognition is so shaky in the first place.
There has been very little study done on what happens to autistic people as they get older, but personal reports suggest that many common ways of dealing with the world as an autistic person can become less feasible with time. Thus, a person who has been working very hard to keep up with the non-autistic world may suddenly find herself slowing down and needing to do less of it. This can look like becoming more autistic, even when it's simply being less able to adjust.
Basic physical needs
This may sound obvious, but to a lot of us, it isn't. If a person lacks food, water, sleep, and in some cases hygiene, they are not going to function as well. Autistic or non-autistic. If you are malnourished (which can happen even if you eat the right amount of food, if you're not eating the right kinds of food or if your metabolism is fast), dehydrated (which some fluids you drink can contribute to rather than solve), or sleep-deprived (which can happen even if you sleep a lot, if you have something like sleep apnea interfering with sleep), you are not going to function as well. It is a good idea to look into these basics before anything else — wherever possible, if you improve food, water, and sleep, you might see improvement.
Being around other autistic people
For those of us who are echolalic or echopraxic, being around other autistic people can cause us to pick up mannerisms, phrasings, and sounds from others. When I lived around mostly non-autistic people, while I had autistic patterns of doing things, I was more likely to pick up non-autistic mannerisms to add to them. When I was in special ed, I picked up (without always realizing it at the time) mannerisms not only from other autistic people, but from at least one student with cerebral palsy.
There is something about other autistic people, though, that makes their mannerisms easier and more natural-feeling for me to echo than anyone else's — even when they are things I had not done before, they feel more right on my body. Some other autistic people have reported that being around other autistic people has a similar influence on them, and this has also been reported by Touretters.
Note: Some people see this kind of thing and say that it is exactly why autistic people should be kept away from other autistic people. I do not believe this. I do not believe that it is worse to have autistic mannerisms than non-autistic mannerisms, and I do not believe that autistic people make bad role models. I definitely don't believe that any of this is a reason to separate autistic people from each other or to encourage an autistic person to dislike being around other autistic people.
Brain damage
Non-autistic people with brain damage often develop traits that bear some resemblance to autism. Since autism is developmental, our brains have already developed the way they are, damaged or not, so there are some differences. But if an autistic person develops significant enough brain damage, it could show up as looking more autistic.
Many autistic people self-injure by banging our heads. This can cause brain damage, especially if we do it frequently, very hard, or to the point of knocking ourselves out or causing minor concussions. Having a head injury for some other reason, stroke, or brain tumor can cause brain damage. So can the drugs and shock treatments (ECT) that some autistic people are given.
The Traumatic Brain Injury Survival Guide gives some information about how brain damage can change a person. Many of the same traits can be autistic traits, so having them does not necessarily indicate recent brain damage.
Burnout
Burnout, long-term shutdown, or whatever you want to call it, happens generally when you have been doing much more than you should be doing. Most people have a level to which they are capable of functioning without burnout, a level to which they are capable of functioning for emergency purposes only, and a level to which they simply cannot function. In autistic people in current societies, that first level is much narrower. Simply functioning at a minimally acceptable level to non-autistic people or for survival, can push us into the zone that in a non-autistic person would be reserved for emergencies. Prolonged functioning in emergency mode can result in loss of skills and burnout.
The danger here may be obvious: It may be the people most capable of passing for normal, the most obvious "success stories" in the eyes of non-autistic people (some of whom became so adept at passing that they were never considered autistic in the first place), who are the most likely to burn out the hardest and suddenly need to either act in very conspicuously autistic ways or die.
To the outside world, this can look as if a forty-year-old perfectly normal person suddenly starts acting like a very stereotypically autistic person, and they can believe that this is a sudden change rather than a cumulative burnout eventually resulting in a complete inability to function in any way that looks remotely normal. The outside world is not used to things like this, and the autistic person might not be either. They might look for the sudden onset of a neurological disorder, or for psychological causes, and receive inappropriate "treatments" for both of these, when really all that has happened is massive and total burnout.
This can also look much less spectacular, or be much more gradual, and it can happen in any autistic person. Sometimes, with more supports or a change in pace or environment, the skills lost come back partially or totally. Sometimes the loss in skills appears to be permanent — but even that can be somewhat deceptive, because sometimes it is simply that the person can no longer push themselves far beyond what their original capacity was in the first place.
Sometimes this kind of burnout is what leads adults to seek diagnosis and services. Unfortunately, many service systems that would otherwise support people in their own homes, cater only to people who were diagnosed in childhood, and will look at someone with a very good neurotypical-looking track record of jobs, marriages, and children with suspicion. They need to be made more aware of this possibility, because there's a high chance that an adult in this situation could end up jobless, homeless, institutionalized, misdiagnosed, given inappropriate medical treatment, or dead.
People training autistic children to look more normal or refusing to tell their children they are autistic also need to be aware of this possibility, because this is the potential end result ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years down the road. This is one of the biggest reasons for teaching us to learn and grow as ourselves, accounting for our strengths and weaknesses rather than as counterfeit neurotypicals.
Catatonia
While this is more of a sign than a cause, it is worth mentioning here. There seems to be a subgroup of autistic people who develop an increase in manifestations of catatonia during adolescence or early adulthood. This can happen to different degrees, and it can come and go. The cause is unknown at this time, and most researchers have focused on movement, although some autistic people have found that sensory issues are affected as well.
Catatonia is a much broader term than the stereotype of sitting in one place in an odd posture doing nothing, and it is not synonymous with hallucinations or something. It is a word used to describe any of a number of unusual movement patterns, including but not limited to freezing in a position from anywhere from seconds to days (and either being immovable or bendable into any position a person wants to bend you into), echolalia (imitating others' speech), echopraxia (imitating others' movements). Many of these traits are already present in autism to begin with, so it is thought that in some people, these traits may amplify over time for some reason.
Lorna Wing and Amitta Shah have written a paper on the subject of exacerbation of catatonia: Catatonia in Autistic Spectrum Disorders. While they have written about people in which this is extreme, they note that there are other people who have similar movement issues but who did not have enough of them to qualify for the study.
Note: It should be noted that catatonia can be easily exacerbated by neuroleptic drugs, which interfere with the process of directly connecting thought to movement, and that lethality of such drugs among people with catatonia is much higher than in the general population. If you develop signs of catatonia while on a neuroleptic drug (prescribed as "antipsychotic" and sometimes antiemetic), seek medical care immediately, because this can sometimes be a sign of a potentially-fatal reaction.
Change in Environment or Routine
Here are some of the more major examples of this category:
•Getting married or divorced.
•Getting fired, getting a job, or changing jobs.
•Promotion or demotion at work.
•Changing schools, dropping out of school, going up or down a grade in school, or entering school.
•Moving to a new house or apartment.
•Moving out of or into an institution.
•Death in the family (human or non-human).
•Making a new friend or losing a friend.
Change can be a lot more subtle, though. It can be someone moving your stuff around the room, or hanging a new picture on the wall. It can be changes in weather, climate, or society over time. Since having a regular routine is one way autistic people deal with the environment, when that routine is disrupted, then autistic people often rely on other autistic ways of dealing with things. We can also have less energy to deal with things and thus look more outwardly autistic. Depending on the person and the nature of the changes, this appearance of being "more autistic-looking" can be temporary or long-term.
Compartmentalized learning style, or trouble generalizing
[Added 15 May, 2004]
Some autistic people learn things, but have trouble accessing what we learn out of context. For example, if you (as I did) learn right and left facing a certain wall in a certain room, you might be unable to tell left from right outside of that room. Then, as you learn to generalize it a little bit, you might learn to tell left from right, but only when you are facing east.
If you learn a skill in one environment, you might think you have mastered it. And you might be right — in that environment. But then when you leave that environment, or when a small aspect of that environment changes, you might end up disoriented and unable to do something that you seemed very good at before.
Many autistic people know a lot of things, or know how to do a lot of things, but have a lot of trouble bringing that knowledge out on command. We might rely on triggers in our environments to help us do those things, but in the absence of triggers, our minds might go blank and be unable to come up with the right answer or skill to fill the needs of the moment. We might have one set of skills and knowledge that we can use with ease in one situation, and a completely different set of skills and knowledge that we can use with ease in another situation. In some situations, we may be unable to get at much of this knowledge at all.
This can make for some interesting experiences with apparent loss of knowledge and skills, or even having to relearn the same thing over and over when we forget we've learned it, or need to learn it for a new context. I don't know how many times I've told someone I didn't know something, and then later had the knowledge they wanted triggered in a different context. If this happens to you in drastic enough ways, it can be essentially the same as losing a skill, perhaps forgetting you ever had it, and having to relearn it from scratch if you can relearn it at all.
As an example, I was, as nearly all children were where I was a kid, drilled over and over again in what kinds of strangers to avoid. Like the kind who would lure you into a car with a toy. Yet as a twenty-something adult I was almost lured into a car by a toy. What stopped me was not that I remembered this was dangerous, but that I didn't like the people who were doing it or the fact that they kept touching me and talking about sex. I did not perceive what they might do to me, only that they were unpleasant. I had this skill, somewhere in my brain, but it did not come out at the appropriate moment, and it was days before I put things together enough to relearn this. I still do not know if it is in place enough that this could not happen again.
While what I describe is different from what happens in what gets called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it can definitely be amplified by PTSD. PTSD can involve mentally shoving certain terrible experiences into compartments where they hopefully won't be found easily, and it can increase a tendency to compartmentalize knowledge in general.
Deliberately adopting new strategies
The ways that autistic people behave do not materialize out of nowhere in order to make us look strange. They have purpose to us, and may help us to deal more efficiently with the world than the way a non-autistic person would go about the same task. Often, many autistic people will independently come up with the same way of approaching a situation (some of these ways are so common that they make it into the diagnostic criteria). However, not all autistic people will come up with these things, or some will have come up with them and eradicated them so long ago they don't remember having come up with them.
This leads to the situation in which an autistic person who has trouble dealing with a situation may deliberately choose to approach that situation in the same way as someone she have met who is also autistic. This has the advantage of being more likely to suit an autistic person's brain and senses.
For instance, a commonly-described activity among autistic people is to carry a single object everywhere. Not all autistic people come up with this on their own, but it can be a very effective way of dealing with the increased load of sensory input and processing demands in new places. An autistic adult may see someone doing that and think, "Okay, if they do that and it works, I'm going to try it." They may then look "more autistic" because they are using an strategy that is more efficient for the needs of an autistic brain rather than a non-autistic one.
This can happen with nearly anything labeled an "autistic behavior," because autistic people behave the ways we do for a reason. A person may stop making eye contact because he wants to listen to what is being said. He may start moving his hands in front of his face to regulate visual input. He might start regulating the amount he interacts with people in order to avoid overload and burnout. He may not have thought of doing these things before, but after seeing them work for another autistic person, he may have adopted them and found them more useful than anything a non-autistic person could come up with. This is not a bad thing.